The Ambivalence of Nihilism
Belgian literary theorist Paul de Man was the champion of the deconstructionist movement at Yale and its Sterling Professor of the Humanities before his death in 1983. He also taught at Cornell and Johns Hopkins. In October, 1966, at a symposium at Johns Hopkins he met Jacques Derrida in his American debut where he introduced "deconstructionism." Derrida, de Man, Hartman, and Miller became “the Yale school of criticism.” “Deconstructionism views language as a slippery and inherently false medium that always reflects the biases of its users,” explained the Times. Objectivity and truth are difficult to discern.
"The simplest and best-known illustration of the de Manian method involves the line that ends Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” We naturally read that question rhetorically, to mean “We cannot know the difference.” But, de Man points out, in “Semiology and Rhetoric,” grammatically the sentence is a question, and it means “Please tell me, how can I know the difference?” The meanings are contradictory, but there is nothing in “what the text really says” that tells us which one is correct." (New Yorker)
Next semester, Where Brothels Are Located 101 and the Angels on the Head of a Pin Seminar.
In the spring of 1987, three and a half years after de Man’s death, articles he had written during the war for two Belgian newspapers controlled by the Nazis appeared. The articles were found by a Belgian graduate student named Ortwin de Graef. The record showed that, for all intents and purposes, the young de Man was a fascist. Further investigations suggested bigamy, forgery, theft and embezzlement. Even the Nazis thought he was a creep. Convicted in Belgium, he escaped through South America to the U.S.. Amazingly his history never caught up with him until he had died.
But the milling, searching torchlights of puritanism never sleep.
At a conference at the University of Alabama in October, 1987, a group that included some of de Man’s former students and colleagues decided to publish all the wartime journalism—some two hundred articles, most of them column-length, that de Man wrote for the two German-controlled papers, plus pieces he published in other venues between 1939 and 1943—along with a companion volume of thirty-eight scholarly responses.
For decades de Man had been an avatar not just of leftist politics but also of the leftist war on truth, the never-ending campaign to recast objective fact as subjective and open to question. And here he was, proven to have written 200 pieces for a collaborationist newspaper.
"Hartman had been in the Kindertransport, the program that evacuated Jewish children from Nazi Germany and resettled them in England. He left Germany in 1939, when he was nine years old. His mother had already emigrated to the United States (his father had left the family), and he did not see her again until 1945. During the war, Derrida had been expelled from his school in Algiers when the quota for Jewish students was reduced, and Algerian Jews were stripped of French citizenship. Both men were devastated when they learned that de Man had written anti-Semitic articles, and both published responses. Hartman argued that de Man’s later criticism could be understood as a kind of atonement for his youthful errors. Derrida’s meditation on the case tried to interpret the collaborationist writings in an exculpatory way. That piece may have done more to discredit deconstruction than anything in de Man’s past." (New Yorker)
So Derrida deconstructed de Man's work to excuse him. Perfect.
The real problem is that people are surprised.
Belgian literary theorist Paul de Man was the champion of the deconstructionist movement at Yale and its Sterling Professor of the Humanities before his death in 1983. He also taught at Cornell and Johns Hopkins. In October, 1966, at a symposium at Johns Hopkins he met Jacques Derrida in his American debut where he introduced "deconstructionism." Derrida, de Man, Hartman, and Miller became “the Yale school of criticism.” “Deconstructionism views language as a slippery and inherently false medium that always reflects the biases of its users,” explained the Times. Objectivity and truth are difficult to discern.
"The simplest and best-known illustration of the de Manian method involves the line that ends Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” We naturally read that question rhetorically, to mean “We cannot know the difference.” But, de Man points out, in “Semiology and Rhetoric,” grammatically the sentence is a question, and it means “Please tell me, how can I know the difference?” The meanings are contradictory, but there is nothing in “what the text really says” that tells us which one is correct." (New Yorker)
Next semester, Where Brothels Are Located 101 and the Angels on the Head of a Pin Seminar.
In the spring of 1987, three and a half years after de Man’s death, articles he had written during the war for two Belgian newspapers controlled by the Nazis appeared. The articles were found by a Belgian graduate student named Ortwin de Graef. The record showed that, for all intents and purposes, the young de Man was a fascist. Further investigations suggested bigamy, forgery, theft and embezzlement. Even the Nazis thought he was a creep. Convicted in Belgium, he escaped through South America to the U.S.. Amazingly his history never caught up with him until he had died.
But the milling, searching torchlights of puritanism never sleep.
At a conference at the University of Alabama in October, 1987, a group that included some of de Man’s former students and colleagues decided to publish all the wartime journalism—some two hundred articles, most of them column-length, that de Man wrote for the two German-controlled papers, plus pieces he published in other venues between 1939 and 1943—along with a companion volume of thirty-eight scholarly responses.
For decades de Man had been an avatar not just of leftist politics but also of the leftist war on truth, the never-ending campaign to recast objective fact as subjective and open to question. And here he was, proven to have written 200 pieces for a collaborationist newspaper.
"Hartman had been in the Kindertransport, the program that evacuated Jewish children from Nazi Germany and resettled them in England. He left Germany in 1939, when he was nine years old. His mother had already emigrated to the United States (his father had left the family), and he did not see her again until 1945. During the war, Derrida had been expelled from his school in Algiers when the quota for Jewish students was reduced, and Algerian Jews were stripped of French citizenship. Both men were devastated when they learned that de Man had written anti-Semitic articles, and both published responses. Hartman argued that de Man’s later criticism could be understood as a kind of atonement for his youthful errors. Derrida’s meditation on the case tried to interpret the collaborationist writings in an exculpatory way. That piece may have done more to discredit deconstruction than anything in de Man’s past." (New Yorker)
So Derrida deconstructed de Man's work to excuse him. Perfect.
De Man is the subject of Jonathan Leaf’s new play Deconstruction. It starts with De Man’s rumored affair, as a young man, with the author and critic Mary McCarthy , then celebrated for her writing in Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, and other esteemed journals. The public intellectual Hannah Arendt appears and she is suspicious of his history as a member of the French Resistance in WW11. Gradually De Man is unmasked in their discussions about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Arendt’s former professor and lover and a onetime member of the Nazi party.
“He is a connoisseur of nothingness,” Hartman wrote of de Man the critic. De Man took the train to the end of the line. It may be that he was able to write what he did, both the chillingly deplorable things and the chillingly inspiring ones, because he believed in nothing. (New Yorker) The real problem is that people are surprised.
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